Karl Klockars

I had been considering doing this, but credit a nudge in this direction from the Windy Citizens who posted my Time Out Chicago piece about the Chicago Fun Club to the WC and apparently liked it.  Thanks for that – in an industry where we spend so much time in the mindset of criticizing and nitpicking (something I’ve spent a good portion of today doing, hopefully rightly so) it helps to hear anyone say “good job” who is not directly related to you.

I had been thinking about posting my first take on this piece for a couple reasons.  First of all, you almost never get as much space as you’d really like, which I understand.  That said, I liked the way the piece ended with a couple extra paragraphs tacked onto it, which add a little bit of emotional oomph to the piece, and takes us a little bit outside of the experience in terms of place, but hopefully helps to drive home how an experience can stick with you and stay in your brain.

Second, it’s worth looking at things like this to observe the work that goes into the editing process.  For the two paragraphs that we lost due to space and the desire to keep the reader in the club experience, and the minor navelgazing interior dialogue whatnot, we pick up subtle changes, cleaning up some of my sloppy writing, tweaking and tightening, word choice changes, and a general snapping up of my prose.

I’m sure some writers don’t like being edited, or feel that the copy they turn in should be considered so pristine that it’s untouchable, or that any changes affect the tone, or any other sort of self-indulgent excuses that roil around out there.  I, on the other hand, totally value someone with experience who can say “that doesn’t work.  Use this, not that.  This has to go.  The reader wants x, give them x and not y.”  And so on.  Every time someone above me hacks up my piece, I say thank you sir and may I have another.  Because whatever they might do that I might disagree with, I can always take away more that has taught me something, which only makes my blithering here and elsewhere a little bit better.

So in any event, here’s my first pass at the “Strip club” piece, which I had thrown out there as being titled “Flesh is the new black,” which is completely cliched, unoriginal, and tired.  See how editors help?

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“I should have brought some flip-flops,” I mumbled to myself as I skinned down to nearly nothing.  I was surrounded by the members of the Chicago Fun Club, a diverse group of folks dedicated to the single pleasure of enjoying life completely bareassed.  The organizer of the Fun Club, Steve, 35, (no last names and no discussing jobs were part of the rules for this piece) greeted me with a handshake, a smile, and absolutely nothing else on.  The day before, Steve had run down some of the rules for me: “First, bring a towel.  You’ll need it to sit on.  Second, no staring.  Third, it’s BYO.”  And there I was, naked but for my sneakers and stone-cold sober, being given the once-over by a room of nudists.

Members of the Fun Club run from their 20s to their 70s; from single men and women to couples; all races and sexual orientations, all brought together by a love for spending time in the nude.  “We have a very mixed group,” Steve tells me.  “We’re the group that invites everyone.”  As a first-timer, it seemed that all eyes were on me.  The other first-timer in the crowd, a 61 year old woman who preferred to go by the nom de nude of Princess Woodbury, seemed to be taking to it like a duck to…well, nudity.  Why was she there?  It’s about acceptance, she told me: “It’s not about being naked.  It’s not about hiding yourself.  It’s about accepting.  This is me, these are my stretch marks, take me for who I am.”

Since this visit was for the fashion issue, I asked if they’d be as interested in nudism if it were more mainstream, more trendy.  “I don’t think any of us do this to be different,” said Steve, now clad in just a sombrero to match the gathering’s Mexican theme.  “We just do this because we like it.  If more people were into it – I think we’d say ‘great,’ and keep doing what we’re doing.”  Eddie, a 26-year-old Hispanic with a pierced nipple and a barbell pierced through his upper back, concurred.  “It’s not so much what you wear, it’s who you are…I mean, you’re born nude.”

Normally in these “journalist wanders amongst the nudes” kinds of articles, this is the part where the writer says something like, “Believe it or not, it was completely comfortable once I got used to it.  After a while, I actually forgot I was completely naked!”  This is not one of those kinds of pieces.  For someone not used to the exposure, it never really leaves your mind that yes, I am completely exposed to these people.  And the parts that I have associated with privacy for as long as I’ve been a conscious human being are now out for all to see.  Besides sex and bathing, you’re clothed for at least 23 hours of your day, or 95% of your life.  So being naked around other also-naked individuals – no matter how friendly and welcoming that group may be – is always going to be just a little bit weird.  The only thing weirder was that after I had re-clad myself, I felt more like an outsider.  Putting on jeans and a tshirt had thrown up a wall – the barrier betwixt the blameless nudist clan and the ashamed clothed writer.

Later that evening, I was mentally filing away the experience while being dragged along to one of those ghastly River North piano bars.  As we stood in line, in the rain, my mood got progressively fouler as I watched thirty bachelorette parties file inside in front of me, until it flashed on me – “I just spent part of my evening with my twig & plums out in front of over a dozen strangers.  If I can handle that, this should be simple.”  And like that, the $5 cover, the overpriced beers, the 18th Billy Joel song of the evening – all of it became nothing to sweat about.  As it turns out, when you’ve already literally had your balls out, it makes it a little easier to go through life a little more figuratively balls-out.

Want to show others what you got?  Email Steve at chicagofunclub@gmail.com or visit their site at chicagofunclub.com.  There’s a screening process for single men, an event fee is required and the Club is not a dating service nor a swingers gathering.  You’re just there to be naked.

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You can tell right away the structure has changed, the order has been rearranged, some things were added later, plenty was taken away.  Other quotes were included, some were refined, and so on. Also, it’s worth mentioning that while we played up some of the uncomfortability factor, I’ve never been terribly repressed in terms of expression and body image, so if the impression came off that I was completely creeped out by being naked around other people, that isn’t exactly the case.  As I said above, is it always going to be a little weird?  Yeah, but probably less so for me than for others.  I doubt they even thought about sending a young single female – although that would be an interesting angle.

At the end of it all, it’s the process that’s interesting to me, and you don’t often get to see what goes on behind the curtain, so to speak.  So hopefully this is like the equivalent of the “before/after” pictures used in weight-loss ads.  Because there’s certainly a lot less fat in the finished product.